BOOKS AND PAPERS THAT REALLY CHANGED ME

Several years ago I started a list of Books that
Changed Me. Alas, the title of that list should have been "Books I Think are
Extremely Valuable". While I believe the books in that list are worth
reading, I can't honestly say most of them have changed me. This list was
inspired by blog posting by
Peter Turnkey. The following are a list of books which I can directly tie to
changes I made in my life listed in reverse chronological order. A more
complete list of books that have had an influenced me can be found
on my goodreads page.

Every Good Endeavor
by Timothy Keller.
The best book I have read on vocation. Keller captures the tension
that we all feel between being made to work and that we live in a
broken world where nothing works as it should. Work can be deeply
satisfying, it can also be great source of frustration which grind us
down. Keller makes the case for working hard, but to remember that our
ultimate hope is in the new world that God will be making. A new world
the is connected to the world we live in now, that will be material,
not some ethereal cloud filled world. Keller demonstrations that all
work, be it the humble work of a house cleaner or a trauma surgeon are
not just necessary but valued by God, and should be valued by all of
us. This book played a significant role in moving me from being ready
to quit the world of high tech start-ups to looking forward to new
work.

A Praying Life by Paul Miller. Paul Miller
asserts that we shouldn't focus on prayer (the method) but rather God
(the object). Miller has a very high view of prayer. He expect prayer
to accomplish things. Not because we are somehow manipulating God, but
because God cares and prayer is a key way that we communicate with
him. Prayers answered tomorrow? Maybe, or maybe in 20 years, or maybe
2000 years. And they might be answered in a way that you wouldn't have
predicted and might not like, but God will do what's best. Miller
highlights how critical our heart is in prayer, and that prayer will
change our hearts.I found this book disturbing in the best sort of
way.

The 4-Hour Body
by Timothy Ferriss. I am not fond of Ferris or of this
book. I think Ferriss' claims over reach and are soemtimes just
wrong. That said, this book started me on a path to rethink
what I thought I knew about health, fitness, and nutrition. I thought
the conception of minumum effective dose is importable for people with
busy lives, appreciating that the metabolic is very complex and that
a calorie is not a calorie, and lead me indirectly to discover the effectiveness of high intensity interval training.

Dying Well by Ira Byock. This book starts with Ira telling the story of
his father's death and experience as a family member. This is followed
by numerous stories about his hospice patients and their families.
This book both prepared me, and grew a desire in my heart to care for Libby
in our home. I am so glad I took a very active part in carrying for Libby
in her last days, and that she passed here, in the home she loved rather
than in some institutional hospital.

The Courage to
Teach by Parker Palmer. Teach out of identity and core
not technique. Fear and alienation are the enemies of effective
teaching. Greater truths are often paradoxes. Trying to resolve
paradoxes too quickly short-circuits learning. The tension from
paradoxes can leave us open provide we have fuel to endure the tension
which requires love and suffering. Finding truth as a community
centered around a subject rather than "objective facts" and
experts. Teaching from the microcosm. Teaching and activism.

Leadership is an Art by Max Depree is one of the best
books about making a humane and empowering workplace. At a time when I
was growing weary of managing others, I read this book and was
re-invigorated. This book renewed a hope that I could have a positive
impact on the people I was managing.

Organizing from the Inside Out by Julie Morgenstern helped
me tame piles of paperwork and organize our house. In our modern life
it seems like we have way to much stuff to manage. This book suggests
simple but practices tools and techniques to organize things. I am
particularly fond of her "Kindergarten"
principle... everything should have a place to be put away right by
where where they will be used. Reading this book also helped me
appreciate how my tendency to want to organize things
"exactly" can lead me to get nothing done... between to lump
a few things together. I haven't read it, but her later book about
purging things would go well with this book since just rearranging
often isn't enough of a change.

The Innovator's Dilemma
by Clayton Christensen has had a deep impact on the way I think about
technology and products and the decisions I have made at work. I tend
to be an idealist. I tend to want the "best" solution. The
Innovator's dilemma helped me finally understand
why "worse is
better" in many cases. I think anyone working in the
technology field needs to expect radical change that will come from
technology that is "worse" than the current state of the art
and to be prepared to cannibalize existing products and markets
by embracing these distributive technologies.

The Sacred Romance
by Brent Curtis & John Eldredge. Control is an illusion. Rather than working
to control life it is better to fully embrace God and trust that He will be true
to his nature and take us on the journey we need. What's best for us is never
the most pleasant. This book helped me consider what was really important to me,
what was I putting my energy and hopes into. This book helped me realize that
some of the things I was driving for would never provide the results I hoped for
and should be abandoned.

20 Things I Want My Kids to Know by Hal Urban. I first read this book in
1992 at a time that I had just realized that I wanted to have children. I
enjoyed Hal's list of lessons he wanted to pass on to his kids. Reading this
book prompted me to think more deeply about what was important to me and made me
realize that I wanted to bless any children I had with the wisdom I had gained
in life, in the hopes that they could benefit from my life experience. This led me to create my Lessons from Life
page as I struggled to capture what I most wanted my daughter to understand.
"20 Things..." is now out of print. The most similar book I have found which is still
in print is Never Mind
the Joneses by Tim Stafford which is a gracious and encouraging book which
suggests 14 core values than any family would be well served to embrace.

Personal Finance
for Dummiesby Eric Tyson is a basic, but excellent book on personal
finance. I normally hate "dummies" book, but this book is an exception.
I read this book when I was feeling weighed down by our finances and what I now
realize was a very minor debt. This
book helped me think systematically about what we were doing with our finances,
helped refine a plan to retire all our debt, and convinced me the need to save
and invest for the future. Since I read this
book, I have read a number of other books about personal finance and investing.
While several of these books gave me a deeper understanding of the topics, but
none
have contradicted what I learned in this book. Personal Finance for Dummies has all the
advice I would hope a parent would pass onto their children about money...
thinks I which my parents who have told me.
Unfortunately, a lot of parents don't know many of the things found in this book
or don't think to teach their children how to effectively manage their money.

What Color is
Your Parachute by Richard Bolles came out in 1970 at a time that
many businesses were downsizing and people in the middle of their careers found
themselves out of work. This was in an era that people expected life time
employment from large companies. Bolles' book was an encouragement to consider what a job
seeker wanted to do for their next season of life. As a direct result of doing
the exercises in this book my wife selected her career, I changed workplaces,
and we moved across the country. While this book can be useful
to people at any stage of life, it is most helpful to someone who has had
sufficient life experience to reflect on what they have done. This book encourages
the reader to figure out
what they are called to do (a vocation) and do that. The money (or at least enough for
you survive) will follow. You might not be rich materially, but you will
be rich in experience and quality of life. Sometimes people say do a job you love,
but I prefer to say do a job that is meaningful, that has impact, and you you will
love the job. When I first worked through the exercises in the early 1990s,
I didn't change my career, but I had a deeper
sense of purpose in my day to day work
experience.

Hints to System
Designer by Butler Lampson isn't a book, it's a paper from SOSP. There is
still a lot of art when it comes to building effective systems. Butler does a
great good capturing many of the factors which should be considered by a system
designer. Anyone who does system design should be familiar with this paper or
expect to make mistakes which have been known about since the 1960s. I have
spent most of my career building systems. More than any single book or paper,
Butler's hints have provided inspiration and guidance for my professional
career. A great follow on to Butler's paper is
Systems
Architecting by Eberhardt Rechtin which has a wonderful section of
heuristics commonly used in systems architecture. Systems
Engineering and Analysis by Blanchard & Fabrycky is a wellspring of
useful information for system builders.

Advanced
Programming in the Unix Environment and TCP/IP
Illustrated, Volume I by W. Richard Stevens. Stevens had an
amazing ability to simply and clearly explain technical topics that can be quite
complex. While I knew quite a bit about the TCP/IP protocol stack, and UNIX
system programming, these two books helped pull these topics together in a more
complete way that I could have on my own, or by reading several other books. I
still find myself regularly reaching for one of these two books.

Lest Innocent
Blood Be Shed by Philip P. Hallie has the message there can be hope, even in
dark times. During WWII,
the entire community of Le Chambon refused to cooperate with the Nazis and helped
more than 5,000 Jews escape Nazi camps. There was no one hero... rather the
whole community engaged in a conspiracy of goodness. Whenever I start to think
that it's impossible for a community to tackle a difficult issue, I find myself
reflect what this amazing community was able to achieve. There is a good
documentary about this community called
Weapons of the Spirit.

The
Ecology of Computation edited by B.A. Huberman is an out of print
collection of papers which I believe gives hints as to where
computing systems might go in the future. Agoric computing, software agents, and
other approaches which are just starting to enter the mainstream were discussion
in this book. More than any other computer science text, this book fired my
imagination, and made me consider that there were revolutionary approaches which
might be able to address righteous problems that couldn't be solved by brute
force. Reading this book was one of the factors that lead me to take a job at
Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center.

Writing
Efficient Programs by Jon Bentley. I originally saw this book as a
pre-print for a class taught by Jon on software engineering. I was deeply
influenced by the four fundamentals rules: code simplification, problem
simplification, relentless suspicion, and early binding which first appeared
Elements Programming Style (which I have never read... much to my
shame). I can see the influence of this book on every major piece of code
I have written as well as how I approach systems which need to be sped up. My
single biggest take away was to focus my attention on what will make the biggest
difference. For example, if a program is spending all it's time in IO, don't
improve the sorting algorithm, go after the IO subsystem.

Perspectives on the World Christian Movement edited by Ralph Winter and
Steven Hawthorne. This is a massive 700+ page tome which is a collections of
countless articles which examine Christianity and missions through the lens of
Biblical theology, history, culture, and strategic analysis. The combination of
this book and the class that used it as a textbook changed not only my views on
Christian missions, but changed the way I engage life. For example, the section
on culture helped me understand how I valued my culture above others and that
was a form of bigotry. I was challenged to learn more about other cultures
and find value in the differences from my own. I learned that communication is
rooted in ones world view, and to bridge that gap one needed to understand the
context of the people you are communicating with and actively bridge that gap. I
learned to appreciate how organizational structures are more (or less)
appropriate for different tasks... that one size doesn't fit all. Finally, I
learned that God was concerned for the whole world, the whole man, and that the
history of missions doesn't have a good track record doing either of these
things. I learned how thru history there have been awful things, and great
things, done in the name of missions which gave me an appreciation for the need
to critically examine projects I might be involved with... and of course, that
just sitting back wasn't an option.

No Condemnation by Bruce Narrmore. I have read this book a number of
times since 1984. Each time I am reminded how easy it is to use guilt to
motivate, how guilt is hugely damaging, and what are the alternatives.
Narrmore provides alternatives to guilt and provides tools to construct a more
life giving approach.

Marriage Builder
by Larry Crabb has been the most challenging book I have read related to
marriage and is likely the reason I enjoy my marriage today. Crabb's core thesis is that the reason most marriages struggle is that
the partners are looking for the other person to meet or needs, to fill up a void in
our lives
that only God can fill. This book calls us to trust God to meet our core needs,
and out of that dependence to choose to love, serve, and sacrifice for our
spouse. I know that when I keep this in mind, that I am a better husband to my
wife. Crabb challenged my assumption that my wife was going to somehow "complete
me", but rather encouraged me to consider her a companion on a journey. Many of the principles which Crabb
applies to marriage are equally true in other relationships. While The Marriage
Builder had a profound impact on me, I would now recommend Tim Keller's
The Meaning of Marriage instead because I think it is more comprehensive and balanced.

The Evolution of
Cooperation by Robert Axelrod explores how cooperation can emerge in a
world ruled by selfishness with no central authority or rule. Axelrod
demonstrates that enlightened self interest can lead to effective cooperation in
any situation where the participants believe that they will need to interact
with each other in the future. These lessons can, and should be applied to
personal, corporate, national, and international interactions. After reading
this book I noticed that I was much less likely to take an all or nothing
approach when dealing with others, and was more more likely to look for win-win
options.

The Spontaneous Expansion of the Churchby Roland Allen looks at the
growth of the early church. Roland argues that the church doesn't need complex
structures and systems to be effective. Rather the church needs to free it's
members to follow after God. Too often, church leadership trying to control what
is happening and how it's happening. This is almost always a mistake. The church
is a group of people who are together, trying to follow after God and responding
to what they are learning. This books resulted in me being much more laid back
when in leadership roles within the church, and has lead me to select a church
that favors less structure and control.

The Dynamics
of Personal Follow-up by Gary Kuhne is the best book I have found
describing how to help establish a new Christian. This book helped me appreciate
what core truths and life practices were important in the life of a new
Christian, why it was important to purposefully pass these core practices on,
and gave me a framework to help someone new in the faith become more
established. I also learned to appreciate how people grow in different ways and
that what someone might need in one stage of life, will likely be different in
the next stage of life. Finally, Dynamics of Personal Follow-up provided me a
basic framework to think about how people grow. I have taught classes based on
material from this book and used much of Kuhne's material when mentoring people.

Please Understand Meby Keirsey and Bates. I discovered this book in
1981 at local book store. At the time I realized that I didn't have very good
insight into myself or the people around me. This book introduced me to the
Myers-Briggs personality classification system. After reading this book, I had a
better understanding of myself, both my strengths and my weaknesses. My appreciation of people who were different
from me grew significantly and I was able to start thinking of them as
different rather than "plodding" or "insensitive". I came
to realize that there was great value in people who were more systematic than
me, or who cared more about truth than people. This book has also been an
assistance as I concerned career changes. There is an
updated version of this book called
Please
Understand Me II which I recently reread.The most recent time though
I got even more out of this book. In the past I would read the description
of my type (ENFJ) be be pleased. I liked the description. This time through
I asked for each characteristic three questions. First, is this describing my experience? Second, is this a picture of wholeness, a reflection of something that is true, of the Lord, or is this brokeness. Third, how is this something that that can stand between me and the Lord: be it something good that becomes an idol, or something that is directly contrary to the Lord. Asking these questions has been quite a blessing.

Walking
in Victory by Dennis McCallum, one of the founders of the church I
attended as a new Christian. This book distills most of the teaching I heard
early in my Christian faith about the nature of spiritual growth. These
teachings had a significant role in shaping how I view the world and understand
what it means to live life as a Christian. To be honest, when I learned this
material it was in the form of handouts and articles... this book was written
later making use of the materials I learned from. I believe that there are
better books for many of the topics that are covered in this book. For example,
I think Green
Letters by Miles Stanford has more depth on many of the topics. Release
of the Spirit by Watchman Nee gives a much more complete explanation
about how trials and suffering refine our character. The Practice of the Presence of God
by Brother Lawrence is much better explaining a life of prayer. The Sacred Romance
by Brent Curtis & John Eldredge is much more effective at capturing the
personal nature of a walk with God. Never the less, the
materials in this book are extremely valuable in understanding the foundations
of basic, Christian spirituality.

The Bible
God and numerous human authors collection over 2000 years. The writers are a varied lot from a diverse set of professions, life
situations, times, languages, and styles. Throughout my early life I had an
intense dislike for what I thought was Christianity. When I finally took the
time to read the Bible I found something completely different from what
I expected. The book of John introduced me to a very different sort of Jesus,
someone that I could respect and wanted to know. The book of James told me that
if Christianity was true, that people's lives should change, and that hypocrisy
wasn't something that should be associated with Christianity. These two sections
of the Bible started me on my journey as a Christian which has affected my entire adult life. Over the years I have read
the Bible through several times. Some sections are incredibly boring, others are
hard to understand, still others are shocking, yet I find myself regularly
challenged and encouraged. The Bible has shaped my life in countless ways. The
first change was to give me hope. When I entered college I had pretty much given up on people and any hope for this
world. I tried to avoid relationships and was looking for ways to get away from
humanity so when everything fell apart I could take care of myself. Studying the Bible encouraged me to re-engage the world and do what I
could for my fellow man. God's concern for the powerless has
made me more compassionate and motivated me to work with internationals and
refugees. Thru my adolescence I tended to view people in a very black or white
way. Either people where worthy of respect and 100% trustworthy, or they where
idiots who had nothing value to say or contribute. The frank portrayals of great men of faith, who were deeply flawed
helped me realize that I can't expect perfection from anyone, but rather I
should cherish and learn from any good I see in others. Most important, I
learned the importance of forgiveness... both receiving it and being willing to
extend it.

Shockwave Rider
by Jon Brunner was one of the first science fiction books I read in high school.
Brunner took the increasing rate of change being experienced discussed in
Future Shock and
extrapolated that into the future. He envisioned a world wide data network which
was used by everyone. Since everything was in the web, privacy was also
extremely limited. Being able to manipulate (hack) data in "the web" gave people
incredible power. The rate of change was so quick that most people have
significant problems coping. Many "coped" by developing "plug in lifestyles". This book also touched on the topic of the
misguided tendency to pursue knowledge without wisdom. This book deepened what
had been only a passing interest in computing, made me think about pursuing wisdom not just knowledge,
and gave me an appreciation that technology is a two edged sword. Before reading
this book I deeply believed that technology was the answer to all problems. This
book tempered my enthusiasm for technology and made me look for unintended
consequences.